A commentary on E-liability: Does it bring something new to GHG accounting?

E-liability is a proposed new approach for corporate-level greenhouse gas accounting, winning the 2022 Harvard Business Review-McKinsey Award for “groundbreaking management thinking”. It is actively promoted by the E-liability Institute and piloted by major international companies, such as Hitachi and Tata Steel. The intention is that E-liability should replace the widely adopted GHG Protocol Corporate Accounting & Reporting Standard, which underpins recent regulatory standards including the IFRS Climate-related Disclosures Standard, and the European Sustainability Reporting Standards. It is therefore important to ask what is new and what are the merits of E-liability? One positive feature of E-liability that could be adopted or enhanced in the established GHG Protocol approach is the direct requirement for suppliers to disclose cradle-to-gate data to downstream customers. However, one of the major limitations with E-liability is the limited provision of information on downstream emissions, which reduces the usefulness of disclosures for managing the abatement of these emissions, and for assessing company exposure to climate-related risk. Our analysis concludes that much of what is proposed in the E-liability method is not new, and that the key aspects that are new result in a detrimental loss of information.